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<div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both">
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<p>
      In 2000 Dave Abrahams was writing an iterator for a container of pointers,
      which would access the pointed-to elements when dereferenced. Naturally, being
      a library writer, he decided to generalize the idea and the Boost Iterator
      Adaptor library was born. Dave was inspired by some writings of Andrei Alexandrescu
      and chose a policy based design (though he probably didn't capture Andrei's
      idea very well - there was only one policy class for all the iterator's orthogonal
      properties). Soon Jeremy Siek realized he would need the library and they worked
      together to produce a "Boostified" version, which was reviewed and
      accepted into the library. They wrote a paper and made several important revisions
      of the code.
    </p>
<p>
      Eventually, several shortcomings of the older library began to make the need
      for a rewrite apparent. Dave and Jeremy started working at the Santa Cruz C++
      committee meeting in 2002, and had quickly generated a working prototype. At
      the urging of Mat Marcus, they decided to use the GenVoca/CRTP pattern approach,
      and moved the policies into the iterator class itself. Thomas Witt expressed
      interest and became the voice of strict compile-time checking for the project,
      adding uses of the SFINAE technique to eliminate false converting constructors
      and operators from the overload set. He also recognized the need for a separate
      <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">iterator_facade</span></code>, and factored
      it out of <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">iterator_adaptor</span></code>.
      Finally, after a near-complete rewrite of the prototype, they came up with
      the library you see today.
    </p>
<div class="blockquote"><blockquote class="blockquote"><p>
        [Coplien, 1995] Coplien, J., Curiously Recurring Template Patterns, C++ Report,
        February 1995, pp. 24-27.
      </p></blockquote></div>
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<td align="right"><div class="copyright-footer">Copyright © 2003, 2005 David Abrahams Jeremy Siek Thomas
      Witt<p>
        Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0. (See accompanying
        file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at &lt;ulink url="http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt"&gt;
        http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt &lt;/ulink&gt;)
      </p>
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